


Prickly Situation

by feroxargentea



Category: Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: Age of Sail, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, M/M, the advancement of natural philosophy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-12 03:06:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16864981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: On the Taxonomy of the South American Rodentia, with Additional Culinary Considerations.(Or, Can porcupines be ate?)





	Prickly Situation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [libraralien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/libraralien/gifts).



> Written for libraralien for Yuletide 2018. Thank you to alltoseek, alcyone and cj2017 for beta.

* * *

 

“Doctor? _Doctor?”_

A distant voice, but one pitched to counter an Atlantic gale, so that Stephen, lying in his hospital bed a dozen rooms away, could perceive every syllable without difficulty, accompanied though it was by indignant chattering from Sisters Teodora and Benedita.

“Este...este medico...? Damn you and your infernal...” A door slammed and the voices drew nearer. “No, no, _Maturin_ , I’m looking for Dr Maturin. Stephen, are you there? _Stephen?”_

“In here, Jack,” croaked Stephen.

The door to his room swung back, its latch colliding hard with the whitewashed wall, and Jack Aubrey came hurrying in with Sister Benedita on his heels.

“Stephen, are you hurt?” he cried. “What have they done to you?”

“Nothing at all. I am well enough, as you see.” Before he could say more, Stephen found himself enveloped in an embrace, the somewhat smothering embrace of a muscular, highly alarmed sea-captain of rather more than fifteen stone.

“You are not hurt?” asked Jack, sitting back at last and tipping Stephen’s face to the light of the little window. “I have been searching for you this week and more, but no one could tell me where you had gone, save that you were last seen heading towards the hills of—” He broke off to frown at Sister Benedita, who, though no more than chest-height to him, was flapping her hands as at a recalcitrant infant, her diatribe growing increasingly shrill. “What is she saying, Stephen?”

“...this braying sunburnt poxy overgrown heathen mooncalf son of a dockyard whore!” concluded Sister Benedita, with a sniff. “And Mother of God, look at the bootprints he has left on my floor!”

“She says she is no great enthusiast for the British navy,” reported Stephen. It took some little time for him to mollify her, but at last she departed, muttering further imprecations as she went. “Tell me now, joy,” he said, reaching for Jack’s hand, “have you heard anything of Deniau, from the French delegation?”

“The fellow who was thrown from his horse?” asked Jack. “They say his colleagues shot the wretched creature in vengeance, though I can hardly credit it, even of Frenchmen.”

Stephen leaned back on his pillows and closed his eyes. “He is dead, then. I am glad of it. Not that I expected repercussions as such, but these matters are best cleared up as swiftly as possible, before rumour can run mad.”

“Ah.” For a moment Jack hesitated, as if he might say more, but then he recollected himself and asked instead, “Were you badly hurt yourself?”

“Just a musket ball lodged in my arm—no, my other arm; you need not release my hand, Jack—with inflammation and an accompanying fever, so that for some time I could not send word to you. Indeed, until today the Sisters, in their heedless indiscriminate unreasoning zeal for the poppy, kept me so dosed that I believe I lost track of night and day entirely, inured though I am to its effects. I am relieved you have discovered me at last, however. If laudanum has one vice amongst its manifold virtues, it is the loosening effect upon the tongue; so that if I must be confined to a cot, I had rather it be in your cabin. You take my meaning, no doubt.”

Jack glanced at the door and pushed it closed with one foot before leaning over and kissing Stephen, his mouth soft and warm on Stephen’s chapped lips. “I believe I do. There are benefits to being sole master under God, privacy not the least of them.”

“Just so. And on that topic, Jack, pray remove your hand from my thigh before Sister Benedita returns.”

Jack laughed and kissed him again before releasing his leg and straightening the sheet. “I am sorry I was so long in arriving, Stephen. We searched three other towns before this one, and we were obliged to tack all the way up the coast, the roads being impassable. It might have been quicker had the people here understood my Spanish, but I recall you telling me once that there are different varieties—the Catalan, the Castellan and so forth—and perhaps theirs is the wrong one.”

“Perhaps, my dear, although I find many Brazilians prefer the Portuguese altogether.”

“Is that so?” For a moment Jack seemed downcast, but it was merely a temporary dimming; the sun soon shone from his countenance again. “I daresay it was just as well. I brought out some pretty strong things, ha, ha!”

“No doubt you did,” said Stephen. He knew perfectly well that his friend’s air of unconcern for his state was feigned in order to placate him—Jack never could dissemble worth a groat—but after several days of suffering the nuns’ alternate bullying and cosseting, he had grudgingly to concede its effectiveness.

“I am glad to have my interpreter back, however,” said Jack, smiling at him. “Is the hospital’s surgeon at hand, do you know? Must I not consult him before removing you to the Surprise?”

“Never in life!” said Stephen. “He is a mountebank, a mere empiricist, while the Sisters themselves value a grinding tedious fanatical cleanliness above all else. Would they leave this dressing on my arm alone, now—this spotless dressing, which you will note has barely a hint of pus on it—until the wound had safely granulated? No, they would not! Nothing would content them but they must be whipping it away and binding it anew every day. If it were not for their sex, Jack, I should urge you to press them as sailors; they would fairly delight in deck-swabbing and the endless minute adjustment of sailcloth.”

“In that case I shall bear you off immediately, before the wind can back to the north.” Stepping to the window, Jack opened the casement and raised his voice to a line-of-battle bellow. “Bonden? Bonden, there! A chair for the Doctor, and three more hands to carry it!”

“You would not be hauling me away on a hurdle, now?” said Stephen, and saw his own wry half-smile mirrored in Jack’s face. They sat silent, remembering the long-distant time when he had been carried, broken and twisted, out of a French interrogation cell in Mahon on just such an improvised litter. Then the blankets near his chest twitched as a tiny, whiskered face poked out.

“Oh, oh! A rat!” cried Jack, starting back with a hurried skip ludicrous in so large a man. He seized a walking cane from the corner of the room and raised it high. “Hold hard, Stephen, and keep your hands out of range!”

Stephen scooped the little creature up from amongst the sheets and cuddled it close to his chest. “There, there, acushla, you need not tremble,” he murmured to it, stroking its spiky fur. “I shall not let you be struck, either by post-captains or by anyone else.” He lifted his chin so that the rodent could scuttle into the collar of his shirt. “Do not be misled by her tail, Jack. She is not a rat but an infant _Chaetomys subspinosus_ , a variety of sub-porcupine. That valuable scholar, von Olfers at the Consulate, presented me with this specimen, and a fascinating creature she is too. He was kind enough to show me the description he made of her for von Eschwege’s book as well, although he had written it in German rather than Latin, the sorrow and woe of it. He tells me the locals call the creature ‘ouriço-preto’ or ‘black hedgehog’, I suppose because it is neither black nor hedgehog, they being, like mariners, more inclined to levity than accuracy in their nomenclature.”

Jack spun his cane two or three times in the air before lowering it and leaning on its pewter-topped head. “Stephen, with all due respect to you and the learned gentleman at the Consulate, that...that _porcupine_ of yours is first cousin to a rat. If you bring it aboard the Surprise, the midshipmen’s mess will be serving it up with onion sauce the minute their stores run short.”

“Then let us not run short, for all love!” said Stephen. “Let us hasten around the Horn with all possible dispatch! She is nocturnal, unlikely to disturb unless disturbed, and as she has evaded the Sisters she may yet evade your young gentlemen. In any case I must raise her to maturity, if only to ascertain whether her deciduous premolars are retained into adulthood, that being a vital point in von Olfers’ contention that she is more closely related to the Echimyidae than the Erethizontidae, and thus not a porcupine at all.”

At this, the taxonomic puzzle in question poked her head out of his shirt and emitted several distinctly rat-like squeaks. Jack eyed her thoughtfully. “Can porcupines be ate?” he asked.

“Should her infant teeth fall out prematurely, soul, and should we not have favourable winds, by all means let us find out.” Stephen took Jack’s arm and pulled himself upright, wincing as his sling twisted. Jack straightened it and tucked it back into place.

“I believe I hear Bonden at the door,” he said. “Are you sure you are well enough to go?”

“As well as ever I am, with the blessing,” said Stephen, smiling up at him. “Lead on, Jack. The breeze is backing, and there’s not a moment to lose.”

 

 


End file.
